Chapter 29
ISABELLA
The door explodes inward. Light floods the darkness, so bright after hours of nothing that I throw my arm up to shield my eyes. A silhouette in the doorway. Broad shoulders. Gun raised.
And then.
“Isabella.”
I’d know that voice anywhere. In a crowd, in a storm, in the dark at the end of the world.
Lorenzo.
He crosses the room in three strides. He doesn’t speak. Can’t. His mouth opens and nothing comes out, his jaw working around words that won’t form. Blood on his face. Gunpowder in his hair. His eyes wild and desperate and wet in a way I’ve never seen them.
He came. He actually came.
My legs give out. My knees buckle and I’m falling, and he catches me before I hit the ground. His arms close around me and his knees hit the concrete beside mine and we’re both on the floor, both shaking, neither of us able to stand.
“Breathe.” His voice against my hair. Broken. “Breathe for me, Isabella.”
I breathe. Because he asked. Because his voice is the fixed point and my lungs remember how to work when he tells them to.
I try to say his name. What comes out is a sound I don’t recognize. He makes a sound back. Rougher than mine. His chest shakes against my ribs where he’s holding me so tight I can barely breathe.
Neither of us speaks. We just hold on. On the floor of a concrete cell in a trafficking compound, covered in blood and soot and hours of terror, and we hold on like the world will end if we let go.
I don’t know how long we stay there. Long enough for my breathing to sync with his. Long enough for the shaking to slow from violent to steady.
He breaks down first. A sound tears out of him. Not a word. Just a raw, gutted noise that might have been my name if his throat hadn’t closed around it. He presses into my hair. His shoulders shake. And the man who acts like he’s incapable of feeling comes apart in my arms.
I hold him tighter. I press into his chest. Kevlar and sweat and the copper tang of violence. His pulse hammers against my cheek, fast and hard, and his breath comes in shattered gasps against my hair.
“You came,” I finally manage. The first real words between us.
“I’ll always come.” His voice is wrecked. Barely there. “Isabella. I’m sorry. I should have trusted you. I should have—”
“I know.”
“I locked you up like you were mine to protect instead of a capable woman who deserves to make her own choices.” He pulls back just enough to look at me. Devastated. “I was wrong.”
I study him. The blood. The bruises forming on his jaw. The way his eyes are wet and he’s not even trying to hide it.
“Yes,” I say. “You were wrong.”
“I know.”
“Don’t ever do it again.”
“I won’t.”
I believe him. Not because he’s saying all the right things, but because of the way he’s looking at me. Like he’s seeing, finally, that I’m not a fragile doll that needs to be locked away.
“Okay.” I take a breath. Force my brain to shift gears, to remember that we’re standing in the middle of a compound that’s probably still full of people who want us dead. “We deal with this later. Right now. Sofia.”
Her name snaps the focus back into him. His nostrils flare. His grip on my hand tightens until the knuckles go white. But he doesn’t let go.
“This way.” He takes my hand, keeps hold of it as we move toward the door. His earpiece crackles. He presses it, listens. “Marco cleared the basement level. She’s in the next section.”
Another room. Another door. My pulse is screaming in my ears, so loud I can barely hear the distant sounds of gunfire and shouting. Years of searching, of sleepless nights, of guilt eating me alive. And Sofia is behind that door.
Please be alive. Please. Please.
Lorenzo kicks it open.
The room is larger than mine was. There’s a cot in the corner, a bucket, a single bare bulb that flickers like it’s dying. And pressed against the far wall, trying to make herself as small as possible.
Sofia.
My baby sister. She’s thin. So thin. Her hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it, tangled and dirty. Her clothes hang off her frame like they belong to someone else. And her eyes, when they find us in the doorway, are hollow. Distant. She’s learned that nothing good comes through these doors.
She doesn’t recognize me. The realization stops me in my tracks. My own sister. The girl I used to make burned brownies with, the girl who called me Izzy because no one else was allowed to. Looking at me like I’m a threat.
“Sofia.” My voice comes out wrong. Too high. Too desperate. “Sof. It’s me. It’s Izzy.”
She recoils at the name. Presses harder against the wall.
I take a step forward. Lorenzo stays by the door, giving us space, and I’m grateful for that.
“Sofia. It’s okay. You’re safe now. I’m here. I found you.”
Her mouth opens. Closes. No sound comes out.
But when I say her name again — “Sof, please, it’s me, it’s your sister” — her eyes shift. Recognition, maybe. Or just the ghost of it.
She reaches for me. Doesn’t speak. Just reaches, her hands trembling, her whole body shaking like a leaf in a storm.
I close the distance between us and pull her into my arms.
She’s so small. When did she get so small? She used to be taller than me, bragging about it, stealing my clothes because she could fit into them and I couldn’t fit into hers. Now she feels like a bird. Hollow bones and tissue paper skin.
I hold my baby sister and I cry. The tears come whether I want them to or not. Since she was taken. Since that night. All of it, all the rooms like this one, whatever horrors happened behind these walls. And I never stopped. I never stopped looking.
She’s alive. Broken, but alive. I didn’t fail her completely.
Sofia doesn’t cry. Doesn’t make any sound at all. Just holds on to me like I’m the only solid thing in a world that’s been trying to shake her apart. Her fingers dig into my back, press into my shoulder, her whole body curved into mine like she’s trying to disappear inside me.
We stay like that until my tears run out. Until Lorenzo clears his throat from the hall.
“We need to move.” He steps toward us. Instinct, maybe. Reaching to help Sofia to her feet.
Sofia screams. Nothing resembling a word. A sound. Pure terror, ripped from somewhere deep. She presses herself against the wall, hands clawing at the concrete, eyes locked on Lorenzo with the blank, animal panic of someone who’s learned that men equal pain.
Lorenzo freezes. He backs off immediately, three full steps, palms up and visible. His face goes carefully blank but I catch the wince he doesn’t quite hide.
“I’m sorry,” he says. Quiet. Directed at her, not me. “I won’t come closer.”
He moves to the hall. Puts his back to the wall. Gives her the space she needs.
Sofia’s breathing is ragged. Her fingers dig into my arm hard enough to bruise.
“It’s okay,” I murmur. “He’s safe. He won’t touch you.” I pull her against me, my body between her and the door. Between her and any man. “He’s with me.”
Her breathing slows. Not calm. But manageable.
I look up. He’s watching us. Watching Sofia. His expression flattens. The nothingness is back. But I see what he’s doing. Cataloging. The bruises on Sofia’s arms. The way she shrinks from his voice. The marks that speak to years of damage I don’t want to imagine.
His chin drops. Just enough for me to notice.
Stefano, I think. Stefano kept her. Stefano did this. Lorenzo will make sure he dies slowly.
“Can you walk?” I ask Sofia, pulling back just enough to look at her. She nods. Doesn’t speak. Her hand finds mine and holds on tight.
“Okay.” I turn to Lorenzo. “Let’s go.”
We move. Lorenzo takes point, gun up, clearing each corridor before we follow.
Sofia clings to me like a lifeline, her steps unsteady but determined.
Behind us, I hear Nico calling the all-clear, the sounds of extraction happening all around us.
The compound is chaos. Smoke in the corridors, alarms screaming, distant gunfire that sounds like it’s getting farther away.
The Santoros are winning. The Benedettis are falling. And we’re almost out.
The stairs appear ahead, leading up toward what looks like light. Natural light. The outside world, waiting for us.
That’s when his hand moves. It goes to his pocket the way it always does. The reflex I’ve watched a hundred times. When he’s thinking, when he’s restless, when the noise in his head gets too loud. His fingers press against the fabric, feeling for the shape of the beads underneath.
His hand stills. Presses again. Then slides into the pocket and comes back out empty.
He turns it over like the answer might be written on his palm.
Nothing.
He goes still. But not his usual stillness. This one has edges.
I know what it is. I’ve watched him press his fingers against the pocket. Seen it when he thought no one was looking. His mother’s. Gone. Slipped from his pocket somewhere along the corridor we just cleared. Our path. The one I can still trace.
He’s going to keep moving. I watch the decision happen in real time, watch him shove the thought down and turn toward the stairs. Getting Sofia safe.
But that rosary is everything. Worn smooth from decades of fingers that aren’t his anymore. His only connection to who he was before all of this.
“Get Sofia out.” The words leave my mouth before I’ve finished forming the thought. “I’ll get it.”
Lorenzo turns. Looks at me. His brow furrows. Then his eyes widen, and his mouth opens but the words won’t come.
“Isabella, no.”
“You came for me.” I’m already stepping back the way we came, retracing our path through the smoke. “Let me do this for you.”
“It’s not safe.”
“It’s your mother.” I look back at him. Hold his gaze. “I’m not going to let you lose her twice.”
His face breaks. Just for a second. Just long enough for me to see all the emotions underneath.
I turn toward the smoke.
And I run.